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F-Rated at Green Film Fest

San Francisco Green Film Festival is introducing an F-Rating to all our film screenings. The new rating is designed to support and promote women and redress the imbalance in the film industry.

Where are all the women

When we're curating film programs we always pay particular consideration to female filmmakers as their work is often under-represented in the film industry.

Only about a third of today's documentary directors are women. The numbers are even worse when you look across the whole film industry - of the top 250 films of 2015 women made up just 3.6% of all directors, 4.4% of all writers and 10.4% of all producers.

As well as the imbalance behind the camera, this has a direct impact on the stories that are being told and the way women are portrayed on screen.

This is where the F-Rating comes in

The F-Rating is a classification for any film which

is directed by a woman

is written by a woman

features significant women on screen in their own right

If a film has all three, it receives a TRIPLE F-Rating, our gold standard. The rating allows audiences to “vote with your seat” and proactively choose to go and see F-Rated films.

We launched the F-Rating at Green Film Fest 2017, and we are the first film festival in the USA to do this. The rating was also adopted by IMDb in March 2017 and 22,000 films in their listings now have the rating attached.

Fifty Percent

The classification was started by Bath Film Festival director Holly Tarquini in 2014, talking to the BBC she said:

"But our real goal is to reach the stage when the F-Rating is redundant because 50% of the stories we see on screen are told by and about film's unfairly under-represented half of the population - women."

The San Francisco Green Film Festival team couldn't agree more, in the meantime we'll be promoting the F-Rating to recognize the diverse environmental stories that women are bringing us.